I am trying to read a jpg from file and display it. I am using Python with pyCairo. I have the following code that works with some help from PIL, but it is slow. I feel that there must be a more direct route. There is an example at this link: <a href="http://cairographics.org/pythoncairopil/">http://cairographics.org/pythoncairopil/</a> but it does not work. img = Image.open('image.jpg') # The next 3 lines are to get the data to pass to Image.frombuffer # I need to convert rgb to bgra. l = [struct.pack('BBBB', b, g, r, 0xFF) for (r,g,b) in img.getdata()] # runs over whole image to convert to string s = string.join(l, '') # runs over whole image again to get a writable buffer data = array.array('B', s) im1 = Image.frombuffer("RGBA", img.size, data, "raw", "RGBA", 0, 1) # runs over whole image twice self.img = array.array('B', im1.tostring()) stride = cairo.ImageSurface.format_stride_for_width(cairo.FORMAT_ARGB32, self.width()) self.img_surface = cairo.ImageSurface.create_for_data (self.img, cairo.FORMAT_ARGB32, self.width(), self.height(), stride) Yikes that is bad. Once I have the surface, then I do ctx.set_source_surface(surface, self.x, self.y) make_rectangle_path(ctx, self.x, self.y, self.width(), self.height()) ctx.fill() Help!